Wednesday, January 7, 2015

The Oxford Dictionary (1993) defines lore as ‘A doctrine, a
precept; a creed, a religion.’Lore
includes, among other things, legends, oral history, beliefs and stories.It can be argued that climate-change ‘lore’ plays
a significant role in the formation of climate change policy in the German
Baltic coastal region and this has potential consequences for the science-policy
interface, leading from post-normal science to post-science policy
deliberations.

It should be noted that this is not the first case of lore intervening
in the German science-policy interface. The example of the German Kur demonstrates
how lore (perhaps combined with traditional knowledge but lacking in
demonstrated efficacy) has previously impacted on science and policy in
Germany.The Kur, although having its
origins long before the völkische Bewegung (which had its origins in the
Romatic nationalism of the 19th century), has no doubt been sustained by lorific
sentiments.According to Pietikäinen
(2000: 524) the völkische Bewegung was a loosely organized social movement that
was unified by ‘a cauldron of beliefs, fears and hopes’ often drawn from
romantics’ notions of folklore and the organic world.Life was to be lived in a mystical, lorific
relationship with the land. The Kur can be located within this context. The history
of the integration of the kur movement and alternative medicine into allopathic
medicine is well documented and suggests a template for the fate of the climate
change issue. Is this a template for defining the evolution of the issue of climate change in Germany?

‘Modern’ lore is often referred to as an ‘urban legend’
(Dorson, R.M. 1968: 166).An urban legend
is a narrative that does not address the veracity of the story being told.According to Zacher (2010) urban legends
often take the form of a cautionary tale or take the form of a moral message,
both of which are plainly evident in climate change discourse.Based on urban legends, it is not uncommon
for public media to issue warnings concerning the threat presented in the
narrative (Gross, 2010).According to
Mosier (2005) these narratives both construct and reinforce worldviews in
populations in which they circulate and ‘provide us with coherent and
convincing explanations of complex events'.Typically an urban legend is disseminated by
news stories, television reports, e-mail and, as was traditional lore, by word
of mouth.Since the conception of the
global warming issue, newspaper headlines, television headlines, internet, big
screen theater and environmental NGOs have all offered a plethora of
apocalyptic scenarios related to climate change.Those who question the urban legend are often
confronted with outrage by proponents of the urban legend (Best and Horiuchi,
1985; Davis, 2002).Skeptics are charged
with promoting urban legends that denounce the popular consensus and alarmists
are charged with promoting exaggerated scenarios of the future.Spencer (2009: no page number)‘contend[s] that the belief in human-caused
global warming as a dangerous event, either now or in the future, has most of
the characteristics of an urban legend.[…] But skillful storytelling has elevated the danger from a theoretical
one to one of near-certainty.’Lore differs from science in that it is often
based on memories and accounts (real or imagined) of first hand experiences
rather than the recorded measurements of scientific apparati.Lore becomes common knowledge as information
is passed informally from person to person and might come to suggest a
perceived future that differs from scientific projections.The implications of the development of such
lore, or urban legend, for the science-policy interface have remained mostly
unexplored.It is possible that the
climate change issue will lead to post-science
deliberations, where climate-change science becomes, at best, an indirect
effect on political decisions, and is either used or discarded as seen fit. In
such an event, climate-change lore becomes the main driver of policy.

This is a brief summary of a recently peer reviewed manuscript, 'Climate-Change Lore and Its Implications for Climate Science: Post-science deliberations?'Dennis Bray and Grit Martinez, 2015 . The full article (unedited at the time of this
posting) concerning the development and role of lore in German climate-change policy is
available at:

The term ‘lore’ has been used to good effect in discussions on Klimazwiebel. I would like to argue that ‘lore’ and science may be more closely related than we might have thought. I have in mind the example of ‘germs’. For something like a century it has been accepted that ‘germs’ are bad, dangerous, that they make you sick, and they must be destroyed and banished away from humans if we are to be healthy. I remember the advertisements for household disinfectants, warning us that germs are lurking in our kitchen waste pipes, only a few inches from where we prepare our food! Of course there was a scientific base for all this, but the ‘germ theory’ definitely became lore. We can appreciate this historical point now that we have discovered microbiomes, and are even advised to get our hands dirty in the garden so as to enrich our personal micro-ecosystems. So the lore served to popularise a particular scientific ‘paradigm’, and doubtless influenced the criteria of value and adequacy by which scientific publications and projects were assessed. If one were to look for examples, there would doubtless be plenty in the human/behavioural sciences, but it is useful to be reminded that lore can be present and important in medicine, and so perhaps also in any discipline studying systems that are complex and of direct human concern.

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